THE GIRL AT THE END OF THE LINE

by Abdelkader Benali

Sloten

A farmer found her with her head facing southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer. The stretch of reclaimed polder land is on the edge of the city, ringed by fields and narrow irrigation channels. Amsterdam’s last remaining milk cows graze in the marshy meadows. I sometimes bike out that way, when I’ve got nothing better to do. When my yearnings are too strong to ignore.

Geese—a constant nuisance at nearby Schiphol Airport—also feast on the grass. If there’s one good place in the city to dump a body, this is it. In my head, I divide Amsterdam into places where you can safely hide a body and places where you can’t. They told me it was my job to think like that. But it wasn’t just my job, it was my way of making sense of the world.

Somebody once left a tourist-office folder with information about the area at the station. Thanks to that, I knew more about the place than the rest of my colleagues put together. As I roamed around the scene, I felt myself dissolving into thin air, so that less and less of me remained.

This was where, in the olden days, criminals were exiled. They were forbidden to set foot back in the city. Out here, they were no longer Amsterdammers, they no longer existed. Someone had ruled that they were no longer permitted to exist.

Modern-day Amsterdam sees a murder victim a week, and that week it was her turn. I saw her in my mind’s eye, standing at the tram stop at the end of Line 1, beautiful, mortal. I thought of her as the girl at the end of the line, but she wasn’t really a girl; she was in her early twenties, a woman. In life, it would have been impossible to miss her. I thought she was lovely. Lovelier than I would ever dare to acknowledge.

A reminder of the city’s old border still stood there, a tall pole that had once held a road sign, rising out of the mist like a sternly pointing finger. The farmer found her body not far from the pole.

Nadia. A lovely name.

The pole was mentioned in the tourist-office folder. I was never good at history. Unless someone explained it to me, I couldn’t understand. But this interested me. Because it hit so close to home. Things that hit close to home give me a chilly feeling of excitement. Like a bucket of cold water flung in my face.

It had rained heavily. She lay on the wettest section of the farmer’s field, a worthless bit of land no one bothered with. Not too far off, the farmer kept llamas and horses. It was a desolate place. The trucks that rumbled by on the nearest road seemed to come from nowhere, heading for some other nowhere. Far off, jets rose from the airport’s runways. Something inside me said those planes were crowded with the guilty, but none of them knew what it was they were guilty of.

* * *

In her pockets we found a key to a bicycle lock, a plastic tram card, a wrapped peppermint from a restaurant, and a torn ticket stub for the Pathé De Munt’s showing of 12 Years a Slave. I’d seen that movie myself. It had disturbed me. Black people in America were treated like animals. Nadia’s ticket brought back the powerful scenes of torture.

At the Meer en Vaart police station, my report got a lukewarm reception. They wanted to know if I’d visited the parents yet. That task fell to me, since I was “one of them,” as the guys put it, and better suited to deliver the terrible news. My colleagues automatically assumed I must know every Moroccan in the city. You knew one, you knew ’em all, right? That was why I’d been hired in the first place, wasn’t it, to put my Mocro background to good use, to offer the police an entrée into what was otherwise for them a closed-off world. Around the station they spoke of affirmative action, but never when I was within earshot. I got that from Ali, who was Turkish and told me everything. “They have loose lips when I’m around,” he said. “It’s not like they want me to hear it. It’s just they don’t even notice I’m there anymore.”

* * *

How was I supposed to tell the family their daughter had been found facing Mecca? There was no question of rape. Her carefully manicured nails had jagged tips, as if she’d been trying to escape, like a rabbit clawing its way out of a burrow that had suddenly flooded. I couldn’t get that image out of my head, but I wouldn’t share it with her parents.

Talking to them was supposed to help us find a starting point for our investigation, some clue that would eventually lead us to the killer.

* * *

When Nadia’s father let me in, I expressly asked that his wife—who was watching from the kitchen—join us, and then I took them aside to break the news. “She was lying with her head toward Mecca,” I consoled them. “Under the eyes of her Creator, she became the victim of a terrible crime. He sees all.”

We sat there for a time, in silence, staring at nothing. No one moved. There were no questions. There were tears, there was weeping.

Nadia’s mother got up to make tea.

Then the father said, “The Creator has taken her to His bosom. May Allah receive her with mercy.”

We drank tea.

I asked Nadia’s parents for her bank statements. They had no such documents. They had nothing belonging to their daughter. The mother talked about her, the father sat silently by. He looked like my father. At that age, they all look like my father. Worn out by life. The subsidized housing in which they had lived for so long had aged them. Not enough space. What I had feared turned out to be the case: they had little or no knowledge of their daughter’s life.

I knew girls Nadia’s age—I’d dated some of them—and they all lived double lives. What they were up to outside the home was terra incognita to their parents. They never revealed who they hung out with, what they did.

This gave Nadia’s killer a definite advantage.

Her parents kissed my cheeks when I left. They had appreciated my understanding of their situation. But it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Somehow, though, I had enjoyed my time with them. I was convinced I would be able to solve the case. They reminded me of my own parents, except mine would never have given me such a warm welcome. Who needs or wants a cop in the family?

One of my colleagues complimented me: “You fit right in. We couldn’t do that. You made real contact with them.” I was an outsider accepted into the police force’s inner circle specifically because I was an outsider. If it all turned out right, I’d be a hero. If I failed, the fault would be entirely mine.

“We didn’t get anywhere,” I said. “They don’t know their own daughter.”

* * *

“It had to be someone in her circle who did it,” Ali said drily. “What did you find in her phone?”

“Girl stuff. Nothing suspicious.”

“Then she must have had another one. Her killer must have taken it.” Ali proposed a hypothesis: “She was cheating on her boyfriend—or pretending to—and he caught on. She was a smart girl, plenty smarter than he. Maybe she texted him at the hookah bar. Maybe he was stoned. Anyway, he got pissed off. Arranged to meet her outside the city, said there was something he had to show her. She was naive, right, didn’t have it in her just to break up with him. Figured she’d do him this one last favor. Girls like her are experts at confusing the issue. This’ll make the investigation more complicated. Even her best girlfriends didn’t know her secrets. There are girls like her all over this neighborhood, all coy and shy inside the family but vamps and divas out on the town. On their way home, they change back into whatever’s acceptable. And nobody has a clue what they’re up to.”

I gazed at him. Ali thinks fast, talks fast, forgets fast.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“You’ll see. It’s complicated, boss.” He held up his hands and moved them apart. “Think big.”

What was she doing out there in the dead of night, on the border between the city and the countryside? What was a beautiful young woman looking for in one of the loneliest parts of Amsterdam? What was she thinking?

* * *

Back at the station, I printed out my report, stapled the pages together, and dropped it in my out-box. Perhaps the results of the DNA testing would be helpful. If she’d fought her killer—and it looked that way to me—some traces should have been left behind.

For the rest of the day, I lost myself among the shoppers. It was spring, the sun wouldn’t set until late, there were plenty of people out and about. It didn’t feel like Amsterdam. No tourists. No canals. No women in summer dresses walking their dogs. It felt like a different city in a different country, where there was so much space and light that it was easy for the population to act as if no one else existed. Here and there I spotted pretty girls waiting for a tram. For the longest time, I used to suppress the urge to talk to girls like that. Until, one day, I decided that it really didn’t matter what happened. Sometimes they’d ignore you, and then you’d feel like shit for a while. Sometimes they’d welcome your advances, and that could be the start of something very nice. I no longer suppressed the urge. But here in New-West, I had to be careful. I was somebody here.

Downtown, I used to go after pickpockets—I was good at it, it was an exciting period, I still think about it every day. The time before my transfer to Meer en Vaart was like a dream. I did great among the shoplifters, because I wasn’t your typical undercover cop. With my three-day stubble, my worn leather jacket, my beat-up sneakers, I could have been an illegal alien on the make. There in Amsterdam’s crowded streets, I could use my appearance to capture guys with criminal intentions.

I was the child of Moroccan immigrants who’d been visibly shocked when I told them I’d been accepted into the police academy. They warned me about flying bullets and murders, told me I’d never be home for dinner, which would make it hard to develop a good relationship with a peaceful girl. Emotional blackmail. I figure a little blackmail can be a sign of love, but too much blackmail can scar you. There’s a thin line between a little and too much. I have to admit that I carried the scars, though I tried not to make a big deal of it.

Where did I get the idea of becoming a cop, they wanted to know. They’d always heard me cuss out the police—They’ve got it in for Moroccans, but they let the white offenders slide—so why this change of heart? Should I tell them about my instinct, my almost infallible ability to see who was cool and who was up to no good, who was a crook and who wasn’t? Sure, try to explain that to your parents, who are Berbers from the Rif Mountains. My father had bad memories of the police back home. “They speak Arabic to us, they insult us, they take our money. The authorities sic them on us to fill their own pockets. Vultures.”

Sometimes I’d follow some guy down the street, because he seemed to fit the description of a murderer. Even with my friends, I asked myself who was running a racket and who was on the up-and-up. It bothered me that I couldn’t share this with anyone. I felt like a traitor.

“Mother,” I said, “this choice brings me peace.”

That would have to be enough for them.

And it did bring me peace. The training went by quickly, although I never told my parents how irrationally the other recruits grumbled about “my people,” the Moroccans, the Mocros, the Muslims.

One part of our training happened at the academy, the other part came from the popular reality show Detection Requested. All the trainees watched it, and the next day it was all they could talk about.

What it boiled down to was that all Moroccans were the same, except me. I was different. One of my fellow trainees put it this way: “You fit in everywhere. You could be a suspect or a cop.”

After I graduated and got my first assignment, I was shy, I kept things superficial, and the result was that my new colleagues didn’t trust me.

They couldn’t get rid of me, though: I was good. Maybe too good. So they transferred me. Something about excessive force, something about complaints from bystanders. I was just a little too assertive.

Sometimes it’s pointless to resist the inevitable, because you know nothing’s going to change.

There wasn’t much for me at the Meer en Vaart station. Those first weeks, I missed not only the bustle of the city center, the anonymity, but most of all the old connections. The way we knew each other, the in-jokes, the speed with which things happened. We were a team. At my new assignment, I was left to my own devices.

Before too long, my desk was piled high with case files. My predecessor—who had retired—was old-school, which meant that few of his records had been digitized. The whole station was still stuck in the 1980s. The only real crime was bureaucracy.

By the end of my first month, Ali—one of the old-timers—had taken me under his wing. He was my big brother, and he took pity on the new kid. “Go here after your shift,” he said, handing me a slip of paper with an address that turned out to be a blue-collar sailing club on the Sloterplas. The building was hidden behind trees, bushes, and a fence. When I turned up, Ali was already there, on his second beer. He’d exchanged his work face for a carefree joviality. He hugged me. “I’m a Turk,” he explained. “We hug.”

If he was looking for an after-hours drinking buddy, he’d picked the wrong guy. I don’t drink. I ordered a mineral water. I really shouldn’t drink, it’s just asking for trouble, especially since I do things I’d be better off avoiding. Which is why I was in New-West now and not still in the heart of the city.

Ali cautioned me not to take the suspicion that dominated our workplace personally. The station had been going through an identity crisis for some years, caused by the treatment it received from headquarters. The station felt it wasn’t being taken seriously, and that was the reason for the pain I could feel whenever I walked through the door. The city center had forgotten us, despite the recent increase in criminal activity. Organized crime ran illegal casinos, refugees streamed into our forgotten neighborhoods, once-proud buildings were degenerating into tenements, some areas were under the control of street gangs. “Let’s say the problems of us brown people are a lower priority than the problems of the white people in the Grachtengordel.”

Only when there’d been a gang murder did they come out our way to have a look.

“Then all at once we’re New York, Los Angeles. The media show up, the social services stand around and nod thoughtfully. Put on their cool act. Shove us off to the side.”

Of course, HQ had to put in an appearance when something high-profile happened. The rest of the time, they stayed nice and cozy in the Canal District.

“The canal ring’s like an albatross around our neck,” said Ali. “There’s the world inside the ring—with all its glamour and wealth and success—and then there’s the world outside the ring, with our six hundred creeps on the most-wanted list, our jihadis in training, our gambling dens, our money launderers, our meth labs, our tough guys and welfare cheats. They don’t give a shit. Worse than that, arkada, they like it like this. They figure they can never get rid of evil altogether, but what they can do is give it a place to live. So here we are in Evil’s Preserve. Marhaba!”

* * *

Now, in the distance, children were taking sailing lessons on the calm surface of the lake. The Sloterplas dominated the neighborhood. Wild horses couldn’t drag me out onto the water.

“My kids are almost old enough for that,” said Ali. “Pretty soon now, they’ll start whining, ‘Papa, I want to sail!’” He dreamed aloud of a boat of his own and brought his glass of beer to his lips. He could drink here without anyone watching him. “Social control, man,” he said conspiratorially, and took another slug, and then another.

I knew this sort of drinking, the behavior of a man who didn’t have the luxury of spreading his consumption out across the day, so he had to suck down as much as he could when he had the chance. If he was going to drink, it had to be here and now.

“Everything’s got to be normal here. If you can’t fit in, don’t try to live here—go downtown. Every crime that happens here is explainable. But what happened to Nadia? That wasn’t normal. They’re all talking about it, even in the mosque. But it won’t last long. People forget. They want things to go back to normal.”

Ali was the only one of us who lived near the station. He grew up here. He lived in Old-Sloten, close to the lake. He could be home in a jiffy; you could get from anywhere to anywhere else in this neighborhood in a jiffy.

“Still, Old-Sloten’s different,” he said, “not like this. Here, nobody knows anyone else. That’s the way things are now. They don’t call us Old-Sloten for nothing. We’re old. Even the newcomers. We make them old. I love that. I’m a traditional man. A man who appreciates the old ways.”

He ordered another beer. I’d already seen him put away three of them tonight, and he might have had more before I got there. Alcohol made Ali a better man. I envied him that. My parents caught me drunk once. They basically freaked out. I had “adopted the habits of the infidels.” As far as they were concerned, I was already on my way to hell. I kind of enjoyed their reaction. Better drunk and in hell than sober among the hypocrites.

Ali confided in me that the Meer en Vaart cops would try to get rid of me as soon as possible. “Then they’ll be happy. So don’t be bitter if you have to move on. It’s got nothing to do with you personally.”

* * *

The kid was standing beside the school principal, waiting for me. They’d arrested his father on suspicion of money laundering, racketeering, and extortion. The trifecta. My colleagues had knocked in the front door of their house and found a lot of cash on the premises. They took the mother away too. One visit from the cops, and your whole family’s gone. I was supposed to bring the kid to child protective services, since he was a minor. I made a wrong turn at first. There was traffic, and it was raining. Springtime was working against us.

The kid didn’t speak, just looked out the window. I figured he had no idea what his parents had been up to, though you never really know. Someone had warned him to keep his mouth shut, but he suddenly seemed to realize I wasn’t just some random guy.

“You doing okay at school?” I tried.

His face twisted. I wasn’t his older brother or any other relative, I was a cop, even though I wasn’t in uniform. He turned away, but I could see he was having a hard time of it.

“I used to want to be a doctor,” I said. “Then you can help people get better. But I became a police officer instead.”

“Nobody trusts a cop. You’re all traitors.” The look in his eyes was harder than granite.

“Who killed Nadia?” he demanded when he got out of the car. As if he were interrogating me. As if I knew something about it. Why do these kids all think the police are part of the problem?

* * *

I visited the other members of the family. Everywhere I went, I was received graciously. Maybe a friendly reception makes it harder to find the solution.

Her sisters told me she loved movies, but she never went out. I kept my own opinion to myself. She never hung around with bad boys. They’d never known a purer girl. Then they cried. The conclusion I drew from these conversations was that Nadia had kept her sisters in the dark too. They knew nothing about her. No details that could send us in a useful direction. Nothing.

Maybe she was murdered because she was so present, because she was dominant, because she was different. At least that’s how her girlfriends described her: radiant, well behaved, defiant. There had to be plenty of guys in the neighborhood who were attracted to her. Everyone was absolutely convinced of the goodness of her character. She was an unusual girl, unique. That breeds jealousy. Killed because she was too good for this world. Something like that.

Her death had made Nadia a martyr. She had been promoted to sainthood. She would be held up forever as an example.

* * *

He was six years older than Nadia. They’d met at a Turkish restaurant she frequented with her girlfriends. He was there with his buddies. There was chitchat and flirting. The two of them began texting each other. They both loved Turkish comedies. He had a Turkish background. “I’m an Alevite,” he told me. She was a Moroccan Sunni.

So she couldn’t tell her parents about their relationship?

He nodded.

Was it serious between them?

“She meant everything to me.” A romantic soul, but I believed him. I could see in him the same sense of loss I’d seen in her girlfriends. “She was one of a kind. She didn’t know how to lie. She lived from the heart. You don’t meet many people like her.”

I didn’t pay much attention to whatever he said after that. What it came down to was that Nadia had been his guarantee against bad behavior.

But their relationship had been troubled. He wanted more time with her than she was willing to give. At last, a few weeks back, she had pulled the plug.

Had he been devastated?

No. In fact, he’d been relieved. He’d been wondering how long it would take before she finally acknowledged her doubts. He didn’t have a steady job, no wealthy parents, no brothers to support him. He had little chance of making something of himself. “She woke me up. I never hated her, not for one second.”

We had to believe him, he said.

Why do we always have to believe these people?

When I left him, we shook hands. His were dry, and rough as sandpaper.

* * *

The forensics report came in. No traces, which now suggested she hadn’t fought against her attacker. The conclusion was that she’d been lured to her death by someone she knew. “The killing must have been premeditated. It was carefully planned by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“I told you,” said Ali. “Whoever did this wasn’t normal. Wasn’t from around here. But he had an eye for pretty girls.”

* * *

Back on the street, I encountered two young Muslim men.

“As-salaam alaikum,” they said.

“Alaikum salaam,” I replied.

They introduced themselves. They were on their way to the mosque. Would I come by sometime, talk about my work as a policeman and what I contributed to society? “We are proud of you. You are one of us.” They’d be happy to welcome me to the mosque. The House of Good. I didn’t want to insult them, so I accepted their invitation. I would come. When I was ready, they said, when I was spiritually clean. When that day came, I would also call my parents.

That evening, I went to Ali’s home. I was uncomfortable about those two Muslims. It was as if they knew of my torment. And there, in Ali’s living room, I felt the earth shift beneath my feet. For the first time in months, I drank. By the end of the evening, I had no idea what I was saying. I talked and talked and talked. I rattled on about the young girls, my feelings of guilt, of rejection. I talked of death, said I hoped that when my time came I would be laid to rest with my head facing Mecca.

Ali comforted me. When I left, he looked at me differently than he had when the evening began. My only hope was that he would always be my friend.

* * *

I wanted to find out where that peppermint had come from, so I decided to go downtown. There were a number of places to get a quick bite near the Pathé De Munt. I went into many of them, ostensibly to use the men’s room, and on my way out I took a peppermint from the bowl by the door. It was, of course, a fool’s errand. She could have gone anywhere in the city that evening.

But I knew she’d been here. In the area around the theater. She’d had something to eat. To drink. She lived her life to the fullest.

In New-West, you didn’t have the luxury to be naive. She’d told him everything about her life, her yearning to be free, her bossy brothers. Her sweet sisters. Her wonderful parents. And he had listened. Understood that she was suffering. She told him everything. Deep inside her was a human being in pain. Someone who couldn’t see any hope for the future. The moment she stepped back inside her house, it was as if she’d confined herself within a glass cage. Running away wasn’t an option; it would break her heart. She was a good girl. Honest. But where had her honesty gotten her? She was living a lie, deceiving her family. And some boy had taken advantage of her.

* * *

A few months later, I was pulled off the case. Despite my background and knowledge, I hadn’t produced the result they’d expected. I rubbed them the wrong way. I wasn’t the Mocro-cop they’d dreamed of, who would fit in among the Moroccan community. In my evaluation, they wrote that my familiarity with the killer’s milieu and my ability to win the trust of its inhabitants had gotten in the way of my professional judgment, had perhaps even prevented the murder from being solved. They were ready to trade their approachable Moroccan man in for a more standoffish model. That’s how I read it, those are the conclusions I drew. Not long after that, I requested a transfer and left Sloten.

* * *

This all happened ten years ago. The case was never solved. The reports were filed and forgotten.

I’ve resigned from the police. I do something different now, though I still divide the world into places where you can safely hide a body and places where you can’t.

Sometimes I dream of Nadia. I see her quite clearly, before she disappears into the polder. She says, I don’t know how I wound up here.

A girl with too many secrets.

I believed that, with my background, I’d be able to solve her murder. I thought I was convincing enough to get the answers I needed, that the solution would simply present itself to me.

I was wrong.

Had she lived, Nadia would still be a mystery.

The only indisputable fact is that she is dead.

The rest is silence.